The Most Stupid Protection Award...

13 April 2004

...Goes to Raider. It only works if the size of a track that’s read is even. However, since the unformatted (or overlapping) part of a track is read differently by each drive this cannot be forecast even if the track reads back on a mastering device as good.

Not surprisingly, the contributor who submitted the game could not get it to work. Fortunately we understood what it is trying to achieve. This is just like the Ordilogic format on Unreal and Agony, in that the synced data read from the disk has ripped bits, but if you write back the read sequence it will be completely different. Not only that, but the game reads more than a revolution and expects the same bits ripped for the second time, while the bits only get changed if the track size is even.

A good idea, but unfortunately wasted by not quite understanding how it worked.